Love Songs is my songwriting project that paired sonnets by William Shakespeare with contemporary poems. Each collaborating poet selected one sonnet and paired it with something of their own—either an existing poem or one written especially for this project. The nature of each pairing was left to the poet so that the works may compliment, contradict, or simply co-exist. I set each pair simply, drawing on the structures and sensibilities of familiar love songs from popular music idioms. The goal is to compose in that small slice of common ground where art song and pop song overlap.